ABSTRACT

The South African Government’s drive to empower smallholder farmers through preferentially facilitated access to procurement opportunities should be concomitantly matched with the smallholder capacity to deliver. However, there has been little information from the literature to examine the smallholder farmers’ predisposition toward aggregation or whether they would prefer to remain independent from any form of organization to enhance their capacity. The study was undertaken, based on a simple random selection of the smallholder farmers in the district of Thabo Mofutsanyane. The results indicate that despite the perceived benefits of belonging to a group, about half of the smallholder farmers would prefer to remain independent from any form of aggregation or farmer group. The results are an antithesis to the common literature opinion on farmer grouping or aggregation. On the other hand, it may be that smallholder farmers would subscribe to coming together for collective benefit, but currently, do not have a formal governance structure or group account. The results provide an alert that while the government considers group operations such as cooperatives as a potential mechanism to deepen empowerment, it remains a challenge to properly entrench such notion for collective group operations beyond the means of the smallholder farmers to access resources.

摘要

南非政府通过优先促进获得采购机会来赋予小农权力的努力应与小农的交付能力相匹配。然而，文献中很少有信息可以检验小农的聚集倾向，或者他们是否愿意保持独立于任何形式的组织以提高他们的能力。该研究是根据对 Thabo Mofutsanyane 区小农的简单随机选择进行的。结果表明，尽管归属于一个群体有明显的好处，但大约一半的小农更愿意保持独立于任何形式的聚集或农民群体。结果与关于农民分组或聚集的常见文献观点相反。另一方面，小农可能会同意聚在一起谋取集体利益，但目前没有正式的治理结构或团体账户。结果提醒我们，尽管政府将合作社等集体经营视为深化赋权的潜在机制，但在小农获取资源的方式之外，适当地确立集体经营的这种概念仍然是一个挑战。